The documents in the present volume present an extended series of reflections by black and white Americans on whether and how these two racial groups could come to coexist and thrive as fellow citizens in this country. Du Bois would describe them, would have to live together in America. One way or another, “the sons of master and man,” as the activist-intellectual W. And yet, well before emancipation, it had become clear that the eminent Virginians’ preferred solution-the “colonization” of those formerly enslaved, by emigration or expatriation-itself faced insuperable obstacles. Support for slavery may have been largely sectional, but as the presence of various forms of antiblack laws throughout most northern states indicated, hostility to an interracially integrated America was powerful throughout the country. For Douglass as for many of his fellow abolitionists and radical Republicans, the grand desideratum was “one glorious homogeneous people” in America-“one nation, one country, one citizenship, and one law for all.” For many others, however, the position taken by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison remained persuasive: abolition was a moral and practical imperative, but “incorporation” of those it would liberate was unacceptable. Davis fling down his Montgomery Constitution, and call home his Generals, will be the most trying day to the virtue of this people that this country has ever seen.” That trial, of course, would last far longer than a day.Īmong Union loyalists, a working consensus in opposition to slavery had solidified by the time Douglass spoke those words, but no such consensus was in sight regarding what should follow emancipation. Speaking to the American Anti-Slavery Society in late 1863, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, “The day that shall see Jeff.
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